Are compassion, unity, and love really America's 'most effective response to terror'?
After an interval of astonishment, Representative Jeff Duncan (R., S.C.) expressed his dismay at Lynch's words.
Representative Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.) also denounced Lynch's olive branch.
Duncan, Blackburn, and Lynch's other critics really are being too harsh.
Like other brave leaders before her, Lynch merely was offering love as the most powerful weapon that ever can be wielded in the faces of tyrants and evil-doers. Lynch echoed the loving words of equally courageous and inspiring figures throughout history.
Well, it worked! The British swam home in 1783, and America got busy becoming a country.
Two centuries later, and across the Atlantic, the existential threat from Adolf Hitler seemed almost insurmountable. Undeterred, Winston Churchill rallied the British people in June 1940 by urging them to lead with their hearts.
Just a year and a half later, Imperial Japan attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, killing 2,402 sailors and wounded 1,178 others. The next day, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed a joint session of Congress.
And, sure enough, Churchill, Roosevelt, and President Harry Truman loved both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan to death by August 1945.
More than 40 years later, President Ronald Wilson Reagan confronted the Soviet Union in what, back then, not even he knew were the closing days of the Cold War. Reagan stood before an adoring crowd in Berlin, West Germany. Together and ironically, they were free people encircled by East German concrete, guard dogs, sentry towers, and machine guns.
Reagan appealed to East German dictator Erich Honnecker's boss, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Like magic, love – and love alone – made the Berlin Wall crumble on November 11, 1989.
Sadly, the peace that erupted that evening vanished in twin fireballs on the morning of September 11, 2001. Al-Qaeda's radical Islamic terrorists flew passenger jets into the World Trade Center's Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Shanksville, Pa.
Three days later, President George W. Bush stood atop a pile of smoldering rubble at Ground Zero to thank recovery workers for their diligence and sacrifice. He spoke into a bullhorn with less-than-ideal audio quality.
"I can't hear you," one worker shouted back.
The Taliban lost control of Afghanistan, and al-Qaeda's power was diminished vastly.
So, all told, the Beatles were right. All you need is love.